The Sunday News
Sandra Phiri Short Story
SANDRA knew her husband was having an affair. The signs had become apparent six months ago after the doctor had told him he was sterile. Withdrawing from his wife, Thabani had found solace on a chat line with buxom 23-year-old Simphiwe.
It’s obvious it was also physical.
“I’m off to work,” he slammed the door as he walked out.
“See you at six,” Sandra spoke to the door which was still reverberating.
Tired of being ignored and neglected, Sandra had snooped on Thabani’s laptop several weeks ago. Filthy chats with Simphiwe were found in the computer’s history. What concerned Sandra was the continued reference they made to “having a bright and blissful future together”.
Convinced Thabani was going to leave her for someone 10 years her junior made Sandra’s blood boil. Had she not put him through university to study law to become the successful lawyer he was now? Had she not helped him realise his dreams? Had she not turned him from a nobody into a well-respected man? Logging on, she decided to pretend to be Thabani, see if she could get Simphiwe to meet her. Would she not get the shock of her life?
Simphiwe was not on-line.
“So much for Plan A,” muttered Sandra in frustration.
Pacing up and down her huge house and repeating the phrase, “having a bright and blissful future together,” Sandra struggled to remember why it felt so familiar. Suddenly, her hip caught against the giant glass vase Thabani had insisted on buying. The vase wobbled dangerously.
“Oh my goodness the vase is going to break!” Startled from her reverie, Sandra bent to the right and caught the vase before it hit the floor and shattered, then something caught her eye. Leaning in, the words “Have a bright and blissful future” were clearly visible on the rather exorbitant price sticker, which she had forgotten to remove.
“He must have met Simphiwe at that shop!” Sandra gasped remembering the time they shopped together. He had flirted with a girl and she had pretended not to notice.
As she was thinking what she was going to do to Thabani and then to Simphiwe, the cellphone rang.
She didn’t answer it.
“Sandy I am coming home. Got a killer headache,” Thabani said after the beep of her voicemail.
“I will teach him about a blissful future,” Sandra grabbed her car keys, jumped into her car and drove at breathtaking speed with fire in her eyes.
She rehearsed the words she was going to say to him after she was done with Simphiwe.
“Damn you for cheating on me. Damn you for reducing it to the word cheating. As if this was a card game, and you sneaked a look at my hand. Damn you. This isn’t about taking $20 from my handbag without telling me. This is our life. You went and broke our lives. You are so much worse than a cheater. You killed something. And you killed it when its back was turned.”
Little did she know that she would never utter these words.
She turned the curve and straight ahead of her she saw Thabani’s car looming large and bearing down on her. She had no time to hit the brakes, she closed her eyes, and accepted the inevitable that she was going to die.
She braced herself for the impact, she accepted her fate, maybe it was meant to end this way — Thabani and she had lived together, now they would die together. For better for worse, till death do us part had never been so apt.
